One example linked upthread was outside the gates of Qarth, where she threatened that if they didn’t help her now, she would come back after her dragons were grown and level the city out of spite.
I think she mainly chained them up because they were out of her control. Not mainly “for the innocent children”.
I have little doubt, especially after the Tarley scene, that she would have hesitated in torching little Maege Mormont if she became a serious pain in the ass.
Like saying that she was illegitimate. Like everybody else would be saying as soon Jon’s heritage was found out.
I mean, maybe it’s better this way, but i think Jon really effed up. Even if he thought people needed to know (they didn’t), his timing was terrible. You don’t alienate an important ally right before a huge battle, that’s just stupid on so many levels.
There are maybe 10 people in the whole world that care that Daenarys broke bad and lost a moral high ground she never had. 15 if you include burning babies in the GoT universe.
Everyone else just feels the story and pace is crap this season. No, burning King’s Landing wasn’t a grandmaster chess move against Jon. :rolleyes:
If someone kills Dany via poison or stabbing her in her bedchamber or whatever, what happens with Drogon? Does he just become a flying natural disaster for the rest of his life? Does everyone go into scorpion manufacturing overdrive, and then assembly a battery that can fill the sky with bolts when he comes around? How smart is he, and how crafty in battle planning, without a rider? And will he go into permanent genocide mode a la King’s Landing if Mama Daenarys disappears?
On the one hand, there are arguments based in the eight seasons of the show demonstrating that Dany has been a bloodthirsty wannabe tyrant ever since her brother got crowned.
On the other hand, you’re telling me that everybody knows I’m wrong.
So there’s that.
She was never a one dimensional caricature of a villain. Ruthlessness and willingness to use violence gives you a leg up to play the Game of Thrones. This is not controversial. Daenerys grew from under the shadow of her maniacal brother to be what Viserys couldn’t be, a ruler and the true contestant to the throne. That arc was interesting.
But I admit it could be a failure of my imagination. A bit like abstract art. If I see a painting of a black square on a white background, I’m going to call it either a turd or a scam, depending on mood and circumstance. If you see a metaphor for the struggles of humanity to break free of its carbon-based existence and get a kick out of that, that’s great. Don’t let me stop you.
I’m not saying everyone hates the episode either. I’m saying that of those who didn’t care for it the vast majority that I’ve seen is because season 8 is a weak product other than visually and doesn’t do justice to the depth of previous seasons.
I find this entirely unconvincing.
But okay, if you don’t like that example, then take the very fact that she squandered elite troops for a large-scale emancipation project, where she could have just lopped off the head of the current power structures and replaced them with herself without any other changes. If literally all of her actions, without exception, served to advance her own power (remember: this is the argument I was disputing), then it would have better served her “interests” to just replace the top, rather than feeding her best troops into the meat grinder in order to undermine fundamental social structures. She didn’t have to free the Unsullied in the first place. They would’ve followed her regardless.
She was quite consciously depleting her resources in order to free slaves.
It was only dumb luck that brought the Dothraki hordes into her grasp after she stayed to make sure the slaves stayed free. That didn’t have to happen, and if it hadn’t, she would’ve had a much smaller army, many of her troops deliberately and consciously used up for her dreams of emancipation. That’s less power for her, not more, for the express purpose of ending slavery.
Some folks here are still denying that there really was a genuine setup for Dany doing this, and after the arguments have been put forth at such length, it eventually becomes a kind of willful blindness to deny it. But the same can happen, to a lesser extent, in the opposite direction, too. Some people seem to be trying to deny that there was any good in her at all, and that’s wrong. There’s actually a huge difference between saying almost everything she did served to advance her power, and saying literally everything she did served to advance her power. It cheapens her character to flatten it to such a extreme degree. And in fact, the narrative “trick” you’re talking about becomes a lot more fun and interesting when you realize there was a kernel of good to her, rather than just dismissing her as a 100% power-grubber.
Speaking of which…
This is absolutely right in general, but absolutely wrong in the specific example.
Even if Old Man Tarly was a giant dick, little Dickon was right there, too. Nobody disliked Fancy Lad. He was a little stiff when Sam visited, but not obnoxious like his father. If anything, he earned a lot of sympathy from his greenness in battle, the ribbing he got from the veteran Bronn, and his noble (but completely dipshit) decision to get torched with his dad. But I should point out again that you’re clearly right here on the more general trend: Dany’s previous violence was overlooked because her previous targets were odious monsters, totally unlike Dickon. But given that, I want to stress something here, and that is how people like me saw Dany in light of her many, many, many victims. I did not give a flying shit about her lighting up Dickon, and I still don’t.
Dickon was not innocent. She considered herself the rightful queen of the Seven of Kingdoms. He and his father both forfeited their lives by taking up arms against her. By her own stated justice system, she would have been fully justified in torching them regardless of whether they knelt. I’m not saying this is my rule of morality, but that’s exactly the point: a lot of us who have been giving Dany “the benefit of the doubt” here have been doing so based on her stated goals and aims. Call it an Adjustment For Medieval Mindset. In fact, I was actually drafting a very long post where I asked all participants here to name “one single example” from the show where Dany contradicted her own moral precepts. Not mine. Not yours. Not the audience’s. But her own. I had this great big post where I was pointing out that despite what all of you hatuhs were saying, absolutely nothing Dany had done had violated her own stated moral code, until the Bells.
And then someone posted the perfect counterexample, and I took my long draft, and quietly tucked it away into the void.
It was definitely a “trick”, as you were saying. This ending feels extremely Game of Thrones. It’s that flip of genre expectations, Hero 1 getting his head cut off, Hero 2 getting stabbed at his own wedding, Hero 3 turning out to be another villain, and Hero 4 being exactly the same kind of idiot as his uncle and cousin. It had to have been planned from the beginning. I still don’t like how they wasted Season 7 in the setup to this, but this whole situation (after some reflection!) Feels Exactly Right to me. This is what was meant to be. They knew people like me would swallow Dany as the hero, and they had her murdering a bunch of evil folks in order to secure her own power to blind people like me, who had switched on the Adjustment For Medieval Mindset to overlook all that violence.
I fuckin love it. It’s awesome. It’s more and more awesome, the more I think about it.
But I want to emphasize something: the reason it totally works for me now is that they really did provide that One Single Example that I was asking for. I didn’t even fuckin notice it at the time, but it was there. I think in my long draft that I discarded I had written something like, “one example is all I need”. They delivered, and I ignored it. Just fucking spectacular. But it really, really, really, really, really needed to be an example where she violated her own rules. When you make that Adjustment For Medieval Mindset, then people like me are willing to judge her heroism her by her own stated rules rather than by yours. And when you do that, examples like Dickon are just weaker than warm piss.
What’s required is Dany destroying the innocent instead of protecting them. (Which she actually did do, even tho I forgot it.)
What’s required is Dany ignoring the legal birthright of her nephew instead of honoring it. (That’s a fantastic catch, RickJay, I didn’t think of that at all. That’s two solid examples, not one. She claimed the throne was hers by right, but then she didn’t care when it wasn’t anymore. I wish this had been pointed out in dialogue with her, “Didn’t you say you wanted the throne because it was YOURS? Well, BTW…”)
And part of what makes the genre trick so good is that very small but unambiguous bit of Dany that is genuinely good, that small percentage of her that (very briefly) isn’t grubbing for power. To flatten out Dany to be so one-dimensional that she doesn’t have that good in her at all, that literally her every action is for power and for no other reason, would have undermined the effectiveness of the genre reversal you’re talking about. It works much better when she has genuinely good impulses that get overridden by the lust for power. At least, for me it works better.
Yes.
This is what I was talking about with respect to the problem with conversations rather than actions. When I was watching that scene, my immediate thought was, “Bitch, please, that’s pure bluster. You damn well know you chained your own dragons when they were eating people until you learned to ride and control them.” Words don’t just mean what they mean. They also mean all the implications behind the literal. Those implications are determined by the context of actions within which the conversations happen. “I’m going to burn those assholes and take my throne” can be said a hundred times, but when you’re dealing with a person who has one hundred percent of the time stayed strictly within her own moral precepts of following due process, etc., then there’s an easy inference there of “I’m going to burn them because they’ll be guilty as sin.”
But the moment she breaks her own due process rules the moment it becomes convenient, then that inference no longer holds. The conversation can take on a different meaning. This is why having that “one single example” (and right now, there are at least two examples) means so much to me. That one example changes the context in which we interpret all of those conversations.
Absolutely. The more I think about her, the more she’s my favorite character in the series–not because she’s a role model (Christ no), but because she’s so complicated and interesting.
I see her with warring impulses. She absolutely wants to make a better world, sincerely and sometimes at personal sacrifice. She also absolutely wants to rule as queen.
When these two impulses can work together, she does great things. But when they finally find themselves at irreconcilable odds, as they have this season, that’s when her character truly becomes fascinating–and tragic, and villainous.
In no way is she one-dimensional.
This, however, is an awful metaphor, because whether you agree or disagree with the ultimate character arc choices, it’s nowhere near accurate to compare the characterization to a black square on a white background. It’s like you’re making that comparison, and I’m saying, you’re not even looking at the painting anymore.
I don’t see what is interesting about her actions after the bells rang. She:
- Destroyed a major economic center
- Destroyed the Iron Throne, the seat of power in Westeros, where her family ruled.
- Mass murdered a bunch of her peasant subjects
- Made many more of her troops die when the defenders resumed fighting
- Seemed to be very indiscriminate about friendly fire
With that she won… fear?
That link was funny in context, kudos. But I’m seeing just fine. What we saw is that King’s Landing burned, along with its people, as revenge for the execution of her friend Missandei by Cersei (LOL at being arrogant and defiant and then hoping for a lucky shot).
I had a different take on Arya finding and riding away on the white horse. Her escape from KL was interspersed with scenes of the Hound fighting the Mountain. It evoked their journey together, during which she finally got a (white) pony of her own, which meant she was no longer tied to going the Hound’s way and pursuing the Hound’s goals.
It was stupid when he did it and the more I think about it the stupider it gets. Why does he tell Sansa and Arya and set off that whole chain? Because they called him family and their brother. Arya says, “You’re my brother. Not my half-brother or bastard brother. My brother.” He was okay with having a different biological mother than them; he had considered all of them family before he knew about his biological parents. But now, he knows he has a different biological father, now he doesn’t consider himself their brother anymore. Stupid asshole. The idea that Jon doesn’t consider Arya, Sansa and Brann his siblings because Ned Stark didn’t contribute the sperm that created him is absolutely infuriating. And, I went back and rewatched his speech to Theon at the end of season 7. Jon tells Theon that Ned was more of a father to Theon than his biological father ever was. And, he tells Theon that Theon is a Greyjoy and a Stark. But now, now it would be dishonorable not to blab to everyone that he is actually a Targaryen. Never mind that, according to his own logic when talking to Theon, Ned Stark was more of a father to Jon than Rhaegar Targaryen ever was. Never mind that, unlike Theon’s Stark-ness by osmosis, Jon is literally a Targaryen and a Stark (thank you Lyanna). No, no, he doesn’t have the same sperm contributor as Arya, Sansa and Brann, so he can’t be their brother. Stupid jerk. I would hope that Drogon eats him in the final episode, but Jon is such a stupid shit that Drogon would end up with diarrhea and the show probably doesn’t have the CGI budget for that.
It’s not that he feels differently about Sansa, Bran, and Arya. It’s that he feels that he is misleading them into treating him like a brother. His sense of its dishonestly is so strong that he can’t hold it in even for a second.
He’s still as stupid as fuck though.
That was my take on it.
Nah. He’s fatally flawed, not stupid. Well, okay, he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but it’s honesty, not stupidity, that leads him to spilling the beans. He could be a freakin genius and he’d still do this dreadful doom-everyone thing.
Ned Stark was fatally flawed. He still knew when it was wise to keep a secret.
We either have different definitions of “flawed”, or different definitions of “stupid.”
The conflict between what you think Jon should do, and what Jon thinks he should do, is a pretty classic philosophical debate: is it better to work from principles, or from ends? You (and I) think that not getting a lot of folks killed would justify Jon lying-through-omission to his siblings. Jon thinks that maintaining an honest relationship is the best approach, even when it causes short-term harm.
That means Jon gets a shit-ton of people killed. But it’s an interesting conflict, not simple stupidity.
Jon isn’t dumb because he is honest, Jon is dumb because he is completely oblivious as to what Sansa is doing and what she wants. It’s dumb to be honest with Sansa, plain and simple.
I subscribed the day before the first episode of the season aired in order to check that it works. I have already researched and learned how to cancel it properly. I’m cancelling tomorrow night after my wife and I see the finale.
We’ll do a full-show re-watch around December or January once we’ve had some time to take a break from it. We’ll either get them from the library(what we did this last time) or subscribe for another month or two then so we can stream them.
Our library has all of seasons 1-7 on Blu-ray and multiple copies of each season, so that was actually a really easy way to see the whole thing free.
That begs the question, though. His moral code doesn’t weigh consequences, it weighs personal integrity and behaving according to principles. If he acts according to his principles, he’s fulfilled his moral duty. Sansa is responsible for her own choices.
Again, it’s not a code I agree with, but it’s a pretty common approach to morality, not a sign of stupidity.
It’s an irony that if Ned had been so compulsively honest, Robert would have strangled Jon in infancy.